阅读理解
I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few
personal stories.
I grew up reading British and American children's books.
When I began to write, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All
my characters were white and blue-eyed, they ate apples and talked a lot about
the weather, despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. We ate mangoes, and we
never talked about the weather. Because all I had read were books in which
characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature
had to have foreigners in them. Things changed when I discovered African books.
Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a
mental shift in my idea of literature. I realized that people like me,
girls with skin the color of chocolate, could also exist in literature. I
started to write about things I recognized. So what the discovery of African
writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what
books are. The year I turned eight, we got a new house boy Fide from a nearby
rural village. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family
was very poor. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say，"Finish your food! Don't you know?
People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for
Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his
mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket that his brother had made. I
was astonished. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could
actually make something. Their poverty was my single story of them.
Years later, when I left Nigeria to go to university in the
United States, my American roommate asked where I had learned to speak English
so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as
its official language. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even
before she saw me. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of
catastrophe.
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. But
there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very
important, it is just as important, to talk about them. The consequence of the
single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of
our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than
how we are similar.
So what if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor
and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast
diverse African stories all over the world? What if my roommate knew about my
Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank
to follow his dream and start a publishing house? What if my roommate knew
about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show, and is
determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget?
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit
called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and
providing books for state schools, and also of organizing lots of workshops in
reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories can break the
dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. When we
realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of
paradise.
